We should thank the state’s Republicans for standing up for the letter of the law, misguided though that letter be. The law is the law.

Alas, the perfectly suitable Shane Broadway will not become director of the state Higher Education Department.

He actually decided that on his own a couple of weeks ago and told Gov. Mike Beebe. It’s a personal family illness issue.

But, as it happened, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel gave the governor a heads-up last week on a forthcoming advisory opinion requested by Republican state legislators accusing the governor of cronyism in his attempted installation of Broadway in this job.

The opinion would find, McDaniel advised, that the law defining the eligibility to direct the Higher Education Department did indeed, as the Republicans professed, require more direct higher education experience than Broadway had.

The Republicans were just trying to mess with the governor, not protect academic integrity. But again: The law is the law. You have to keep coming back to that.

Our public colleges and universities are independent fiefdoms run by their own presidents and boards, not by any state regulatory agency, as the University of Central Arkansas reminds us time and again, sometimes tragically.

The Higher Education Department is mostly window-dressing. It became more important recently only with the advent of the lottery scholarships and its new assignment to administer these scholarships.

That is to say, as a practical matter, the director of this department needs political skill and command of the lottery and of scholarships. And I dare say no one in the state came better-equipped to that assignment than Broadway. He was no crony, but the right man for the job, except for, you know, the law.

As a mere boy, Broadway emerged as a speaker of the House of Representatives and, in that capacity, took a leading role in steering the state through a funding problem in its pre-lottery academic challenge scholarships. Then he got elected to the Senate where he became one of the go-to guys on the complicated legislation implementing the new lottery.

He would have been elected lieutenant governor last year except for the tragic tea party uprising. So he landed as deputy director of this Higher Education Department, and, when a vacancy in the directorship arose, Broadway assumed the acting directorship and then Beebe sought to make that permanent.

Then the Republicans got all sanctimonious about cronyism and academic purity in an academic job, which, as I’ve attempted to explain, the Higher Education director isn’t much — an academic, job, I mean.

Here is what is likely to happen: The new academically pure director, when chosen, will opt to keep Broadway as his or her deputy director actually to run things or at least to keep him or her out of trouble on politics and the lottery.

Now, in regard to UCA and academic jobs: Some people around Conway and elsewhere are touting term-limited state Sen. Gilbert Baker of there in town, co-chairman of the Joint Budget Committee and a former music professor on the campus, as a presidential prospect.

I think he’d be a splendid choice except for the fact that installing another politically astute former state Senate leader might not be a clean-enough break from all that Lu Hardin distress.

Beyond that, Baker cannot possibly attend properly to ethical appearances by offering himself as a candidate while co-chairing Joint Budget, which sets the colleges’ budgets.

As it happens, Baker told me last week he believes a healing process at UCA would best be served if Tom Courtway, the widely respected if ever-beleaguered interim president, served in that interim basis for a year or even two. A new presidential search, which will inevitably create contentiousness, need not be undertaken right away, Baker said.

As to whether he might seek the job in a year or two after he has departed as a state senator, which he’ll be required to do after this term under the state’s term-limits law, Baker said something about crossing bridges when you come to them.

The UCA’s president job shouldn’t be so hard. What you do is get good people to help the place run itself. Then you stay away from Tunica. Then you regard the free house they give you as perfectly suitable, especially at the price.

John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His email address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.